Last week I went to a new friend’s house (Rachel – Orange Whisk) with some other lovely handmade friends (Stacey – Cheeky Textiles & Jenny – Posie Patchwork) for a Gingerbread house decorating party! I’ve never done a gingerbread house before, because I really dislike Gingerbread. Luckily for me though, Rachel was kind enough to make me a house template made from Vanilla Cookie dough instead =D

I had SO much fun!

It was surprisingly a lot easier than I thought it would be to do the decorating (never mind it took me 4 hours, because I had little Rafa with me and ended up having to sway with him in a sling while trying to pipe the straight lines on the roof).

I love all the little spinkles you can get these days to decorate with! We had little sugar snow flakes, and tiny peppermint candy canes!

I’m pretty pleased with my creation, you can see my tiny wreath above (another reason it took me 4 hours perhaps? Maybe a bit too much of a perfectionist. Though it’s definitely not perfect, will have to do much better next year!).

It’s a small house, to get a sense of scale here’s a photo next to a mug (hence the difficulty of the wreath):

And of course, what DIY project by Mikaela would be complete without something messing up! One of my walls fell in when I put the roof on. I didn’t line things up properly and even though the “cement” for the wall had set, the roof knocked it in. Rookie mistake.

And OF COURSE, after taking all these photos, I left the room for 30 seconds and Girds took a nice big bite out of the whole thing. Lucky it was on the dodgy side =P

Do you make Gingerbread Houses for Christmas? Did you make one this year? I’d love to see some other creations!

For Katie’s baby shower back in September I decorated a cake to match her Jungle Animals theme, it was lots of fun and I LOVE how it turned out!

I’ve come to realise I’m definitely more of a decorator than a baker, so I bought a chocolate mud cake from The Cheesecake Shop and decorated that. I bought the icing sugar animals along with the ladybugs and butterflies, and made the vines and leaves myself from fondant icing mix and regular food colouring. Next time I’ll try making everything myself from the fondant mix =)

This one is also bad. It was supposed to be a star, not sure what went wrong…

Finally, a winner! Cloudy Day:

Too tired to do anything properly:

Epic Fail at writing “love”:

Success! Love:

Butterfly:

I guess this silly little coffee illustration thing I do is kind of like temporary street art. Time consuming and difficult, and short-lasting, but fun. So however street art people justify that form of art, I’ll just CMD+C CMD+V please.